An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: General Motors will pay $220 million to 36 states to settle allegations that it illegally sold private driving behavior and location information to data brokers. As part of the settlement, GM must get drivers' express consent before it collects or shares their driving and location data -- terms that are in line with separate agreements it previously reached with California and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This settlement does contain a new requirement that GM must have a third party assess the automaker's compliance with the privacy program it has put in place.
The agreement announced Thursday settles a lawsuit brought by a coalition of attorneys general from 36 states that alleged GM had sold the information to data brokers, which in turn then sold it to insurance providers. "This agreement addresses Smart Driver, a product we ended in 2024, and reinforces steps we've taken to strengthen our privacy practices," GM said in an emailed statement. "Safer, more helpful and personalized experiences are enabled by connected vehicle data, and GM is committed to being clear about what information is used, how it's protected, and the choices customers have about what they share."
The settlement comes more than two years after a New York Times report showed how GM and OnStar collected, used, and sold drivers' precise geolocation data and driving behavior to third parties, including data brokers LexisNexis and Verisk. The data was collected through GM's Smart Driver program, a free feature contained within its connected car apps that tracked and rated driving behaviors and seat belt use. Data brokers sold this information to insurance providers, which could affect customers' rates, the NYT reported at the time.
BRASĂLIA (ANP/AFP) - BraziliĂ« heeft een Argentijnse diplomaat ontboden om "uitleg te geven" over de reisbewegingen van FlĂĄvio Bolsonaro. Die politicus vluchtte na de door hem verloren presidentsverkiezingen via ArgentiniĂ« naar de Verenigde Staten.
Het is niet duidelijk welk paspoort Bolsonaro gebruikt heeft tijdens zijn vlucht. Hij beschikte als senator bijvoorbeeld over een diplomatiek paspoort. Toen hij de deadline had gemist voor het inleveren werd dat ongeldig verklaard. Volgens internationale media gebruikte hij mogelijk een Italiaans paspoort, dat hij sinds 2023 heeft door zijn Italiaanse voorouders.
HEERENVEEN (ANP) - Jasper Krommenhoek heeft bij het kwalificatietoernooi voor de wereldbeker in Heerenveen de 5000 meter gewonnen. De 22-jarige schaatser van Reggeborgh bleef met een persoonlijk record van 6.10,83 teamgenoot Marcel Bosker en Wisse Slendebroek van Team Royal A-ware voor.
De beste vijf schaatsers plaatsen zich voor de wereldbeker op de 5000 meter. Naast Krommenhoek, Bosker en Slendebroek zijn dat Jorrit Bergsma en Sil van der Veen. De eerste wereldbekerwedstrijd is op 13 november in Beijing.
Slendebroek versloeg in een rechtstreeks duel Beau Snellink in 6.12,20, en was ook sneller dan de 6.15,03 van Van der Veen. Snellink bleef met 6.17,35 boven de tijd van Van der Veen en greep zo met de zevende tijd naast de tickets voor de wereldbeker. Krommenhoek was in de achtste rit met een aflopend schema met 6.10,83 sneller dan Slendebroek.
Stijn van de Bunt en Bosker konden in de rit erna niet aan de tijd van Krommenhoek komen. Bosker bleef nog in de buurt met 6.11,10. Van de Bunt greep met de zesde tijd van 6.16,31 naast een wereldbekerplek. Ook Chris Huizinga miste met 6.22,52 in de slotrit een wereldbekerticket. Routinier Bergsma slaagde daar met de vierde tijd van 6.14,79 wel in.
LONDEN (ANP/AFP) - De Britse mededingingsautoriteit CMA onderzoekt nieuwe voorwaarden van Meta. Het moederbedrijf van Facebook en Instagram zou met de voorwaarden mediacontent mogen gebruiken voor zijn eigen producten, zonder dat bedrijven daar voldoende keuzevrijheid over krijgen.
Het Amerikaanse techbedrijf zou content van websites van nieuwsuitgevers, die gebruikmaken van bijvoorbeeld Facebook, kunnen gebruiken om eigen producten te ontwikkelen en aan te bieden. Uit het onderzoek moet blijken of die voorwaarden nieuwsuitgevers en andere contentbedrijven onevenredig benadelen, stelt de CMA.
Duizenden Britse bedrijven zijn afhankelijk van Meta om klanten en publiek te bereiken. De toezichthouder onderzoekt of Meta met die voorwaarden "misbruik maakt van een machtspositie".
"We hebben zorgen gehoord van nieuwsuitgevers en andere bedrijven en gaan snel onderzoeken of de voorgestelde wijzigingen van Meta in strijd zijn met het mededingingsrecht", zegt Sarah Cardell, topvrouw van de CMA. Meta heeft het invoeren van de nieuwe voorwaarden al uitgesteld.
Rubber stamp carving on latex rubber block, over acrylic painted book pages. Makes great collage papers for mailart, etc. Inspired by Lotta Jansdotter print making book
Tributes have poured in for Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86. The distinguished actor had a long and varied career that began on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before going on to global stardom on the screen in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises. Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940, and had spoken of a challenging childhood marred by alcoholism and domestic violence â something he campaigned against for much of his life. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw
Alliance for the Future, unveiled at Montreal summit and open to other countries, conceived for world âshaken by new stormsâ
Canada and Europe have announced a new alliance of like-minded nations toserve as both a âprotective canopy under which our citizens can thriveâ and a powerful hedge against the unpredictable nature of geopolitics, while welcoming other countries to join.
Speaking to reporters on Friday from Montreal, the prime minister, Mark Carney, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, called the new partnership the Alliance for the Future and said the âdeepest possible partnership between Canada and the 27-member bloc had the potential to offer unprecedented stability and opportunityâ.
Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough
A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month.
The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, fell by more than 1% Friday, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the same month. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down even further, more than 3%, also erasing hundreds of billions in value. The Down Jones Industrial Average fell less.
In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.
On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month. OTW confirmed in an updated status report Friday morning that this outage is due to a security incident.
Some have speculated that the outage is a result of the PHP scramble this week that led to several sites going down to update their security, but AO3 doesn’t use PHP. An OTW representative told CNET: “I can let you know that this is not related to the PHP security issue as the Archive uses Ruby on Rails.”
A lot of people are grieving the loss of Kinktober, AO3’s annual group writing exercise where writers upload a chapter or fic every day throughout October based on a prompt of the day. (The prompts are horny, if that’s not clear.) Several of the writers and readers who reached out to me following the outage brought up the poor timing around Kinktober.
One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3, told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.
“The outage hasn’t derailed my desire to write. If anything, I want to have more chapters ready to go so my readers can eat good once it’s over,” she said.
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Do you know anything else about what happened to Ao3? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.
Some writers are considering posting elsewhere while they wait for AO3 to return, but it’s not an ideal workaround. AO3 author who goes by Selkie Myth told me they’re moving to Space Battles, another fanfiction site, during the outage. “I'm shrugging and just posting on SB [Space Battles] while the site's down. Hopefully I'll remember to post the chapters over on AO3 once it's back up — the story is projected to end during the outage. I anticipate the same is true for a lot of other authors,” they said.
Some people have said they’ll try fanfiction.net in the meantime, but it’s a much more bare-bones website. Fanfiction site Sufficient Velocity added a banner to its homepage welcoming AO3 refugees: “We’ve had a big influx of guests due to the AO3 outage. If you've been affected by the outage we're sorry to hear that and hope that they're able to get that fixed soon.” Wattpad, which many fanfiction writers and readers really, really hate for reasons I won’t get into here, posted on X: “we're here to support you during this difficult time.” Overwhelmingly, the replies are from people telling Wattpad to go away.
Another AO3 writer who goes by Ren told me she has two long works in progress right now with nowhere to post them. Posting elsewhere poses continuity and discovery problems, as some of these fanfiction works span chapters and hundreds of thousands of words of character and worldbuilding. “I could technically keep posting updates on sites like tumblr through the downtime, but both of these fics are quite long and I haven't been posting them anywhere other than AO3 — if I drop a new chapter for my 130k Pokemon Black and White fanfic on Tumblr completely out of context, people just now finding my work aren't going to be able to read the rest for a while :(“ she told me in an email. “I have seen other authors posting their gdocs and Ellipsus reader links in the meantime, but my draft files aren't exactly presentable... I will keep marinating but what will probably happen is my wips [works in progress] will just be on hiatus for a bit. My readers are used to hiatuses at least.”
Another writer said she’s not considering posting elsewhere. “Wattpad can piss off,” she said. “But I may go back to fanfiction.net to save and physically print some of my favorite fics from way back in the day (the ancient/sacred texts, if you will) to ensure I have copies of those somewhere. This outage is a good reminder that things can vanish in the blink of an eye, whether a website crashes or is hacked or an author decides to suddenly delete their fic. If you love something, smash the kudos button, comment on it, bookmark it, subscribe, and consider downloading it. You never know.”
A reader who emailed me following the outage said they’ve been enjoying getting into AO3 as a new fan. “I was a big fanfic skeptic, but that’s changed lately. I’ve found some truly excellent writers, and real creativity. The free nature of it in this increasingly horrifying stage of capitalism is refreshing,” they said.
AO3 has said in status updates and to journalists that they don’t expect any data loss. Losing works would be devastating for writers and readers, but AO3 is more than just a repository for writing; it’s a community of people commenting and reacting to those stories. Selkie mentioned the rigorous tagging habits of AO3 members, where stories are tagged with sometimes dozens of fanfiction tropes, character names, content hints and warnings, and can constitute a language specific to the platform and its readers; “Crack Treated Seriously,” for example, means writing a silly premise with a straight face, while “Idiots in Love” is self explanatory.
“To me, the more devastating thing would be to lose the comments and kudos on my fic. Technically I have them saved elsewhere because I get AO3 email alerts, but seeing them threaded in one place at the end of a chapter hits different,” a writer said. “Comments can turn an author’s entire day around and restore their will to live. I often reread them if I have writer’s block or a bad bout of imposter syndrome. They also turn the otherwise solitary act of writing into something communal. Seeing someone experience your story chapter by chapter is incredibly motivating and makes the writing process feel less isolating.”
OTW is entirely volunteer-run, and people on social media and in speaking to them directly have said they hope AO3 users go easy on staff during this time. “So many people rely on AO3 as an outlet for creativity and escapism as the real world burns, myself included. It’s also important to remember that the site is run by volunteers,” that writer said. “The work they do to protect writers, fight censorship and safeguard freedom of expression is extremely important and necessary, especially right now. They deserve all the respect and patience in the world as they work to get the archive back up and running. Be kind.”
Ren, echoing those sentiments, sent me a meme:
“An additional sentiment I've seen is ‘ok so when AO3 comes back we're all going to tell our favorite authors how much we missed their work, right?’ which I hope catches on — I'm writing for niche fandoms and had to disable guest comments due to bot spam, so comments are few and far between as it is,” Ren said. “I do kind of hope that the extended outage serves as a sort of wake-up call to anyone who's been taking ao3 for granted lately. It certainly was for me.”
De opmars van Feyenoord viel dit seizoen min of meer samen met de positieverandering van Luciano Valente. De middenvelder werd door een gebrek aan smaken in de aanvalslinie op de linksbuitenpositie geposteerd. Maar is dit wel goed voor zijn carriĂšre? Of moet de aanvoerder van Feyenoord weer middenvelder worden?
Gall wasps, also known as cynipids, have a unique mutual relationship with plants. Their name is derived from the deposits, called galls, which they induce on host plants to support their larvae. The benign growths are created by chemicals that the larvae insert into the plant, drawing on its resources. These phenomena are often very tiny, occasionally appear in clusters, and can range from ruddy brown to vibrant pinks and yellows. Nature photographer Timothy Boomer can’t get enough of them.
“Galls can be brought about by many different organisms, but I tend to focus on the ones induced by cynipid wasps because they are the most visually stunning (at least in my opinion),” Boomer tells Colossal.
Striped volcano gall induced by the cynipid wasp (Feron atrimentum, formerly Andricus atrimentus), Solano County, California
A gall serves as both protection and a food source for the insect growing inside. If all goes according to plan, the larva remains safe from predators, receives enough food, and grows into an adult before climbing out and continuing the cycle. Different species of wasp create unique characteristics, often on very specific parts of the plants. Scientists believe there are at least around 1,300 cynipids globally.
Sometimes, environmental effects change the nodules’ appearance. Boomer points to the spined turban gall, which typically has a bubblegum-pink hue with spines protruding from a relatively flat center. He also captured an atypical one, which is a darker pink with blackened tips and spikes all over. “In this case, normal development was interrupted by a non-inducer entering the gall at an early stage,” Boomer says. “I’m not a scientist, so I won’t pretend to fully comprehend the intricacies of how all this plays out, but I think of it as a ‘home invasion’ that actually alters the home.”
At such minuscule scale with shallow depth-of-field, Boomer uses a focus-stacking technique, which involves taking hundreds, sometimes thousands of images and layering them digitally to make the tiny objects clear. He edits minimally in Photoshop to retain the integrity of the original scene and is passionate about sharing only what occurs naturally. Essentially, he lets the beautiful, bizarre geometries be what they are. “Nature does not need to be ‘enhanced,'” he says.
Find Boomer’s work on Instagram, where you can explore slime molds, flowers, and more.
Urchin gall wasp (Antron quercusechinus), gall on blue oak, Lake Berryessa, Napa County, CaliforniaSpined turban gall wasp (Antron douglasii) on valley oak, Solano County, California, USAFlange gall induced by undescribed Cynipid wasp on blue oak, Vacaville, Solano County, CaliforniaDisc gall wasp (Feron parmula), extreme close-up of the surface of a single gall, Lake Berryessa, Napa County, CaliforniaBeaked twig gall induced by Burnettweldia plumbella (formerly Disholcaspis plumbella), Lake Berryessa, Napa County, CaliforniaRed cone galls induced by Feron kingi on a valley oak leaf, Vacaville, Solano County, California, USA.Woollybear gall wasp (Atrusca trimaculosa), galls on valley oak, Vacaville, Solano County, California
Dagelijks stromen duizenden fotoâs uit de hele wereld onze beeldbanken binnen. Van gruwelijke actualiteit tot verstilde landschappen, van breaking news tot ogenschijnlijk kleine momenten. Wat kies je als alles tegelijk gebeurt? Waar leg je de nadruk en welke beeldenn blijven je bij? Elke maand selecteert de fotoredactie van NRC de fotoâs die de meeste indruk maakten.
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